On the 27th of April, 2016, the European Union published the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, which went into effect on the 25h of May, 2018. This piece of legislation fundamentally altered the dynamic between tech companies and their users.
Before becoming small business owners, the two of us at Tupperbox were longtime users of all sorts of software and services. We value our privacy and consumer rights just as much as anyone else, and wholeheartedly believe in the vision of transparency and accountability outlined in the GDPR. When it came time to publish our own Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, we set out to draft policies that maximally align with the values enshrined in the GDPR, instead of just creating policies that maximally cover our asses with dense legal devices and arbitration clauses.
Unfortunately, when searching for templates or products to help draft these policies, we found that the product space for legal drafting heavily favors ass-covering over establishing good faith symbiotic relationship with the consumer. Many of the policies we reviewed seemed far too legally dense, terse, or just outright written with opposition of the consumer in mind - as if meant to establish a parasitic relationship with the consumer, far overreaching what should be a minimal contract between a user and a service they may have only used once.
We decided to instead spend weeks working with our lawyer to draft our own policies from scratch. We wanted approachable, easy to understand policies that align tightly with the spirit of consumer protections, and that communicate to our users in plain language our genuine intent to run Tupperbox with their rights and interests in mind. This ended up being a serious effort - the GDPR was in many ways the first big step in moving toward a brighter horizon for consumer rights, but unfortunately it also introduces a significant roadblock for small app creators who need to comply with their regulations.
We're releasing our work under CC0 so that others in our position can have a helping hand in getting their own pro-consumer policies published. Our hope is to showcase and advance a different kind of landscape for small apps, where users can be confident that the app creators they entrust their data to will use their data responsibly and transparently, and are willing to be held to account for any failures to do so.
Tupperbox is primarily a Discord bot, and as such our policies have a few unique provisions and structures that are tailored to the Discord bot platform. If your app is not a Discord bot you may still find our policies useful, but you may need to make some modifications to better fit your app's platform.
Our policies are presented in the policies folder in markdown format under no copy restrictions whatsoever, as released by the CC0 license. You can convert the markdown text to html or another document format if needed.
The explicit objective of the Privacy Policy is to transparently outline how your app and company will use a user's data. If your app does not conform to the strict uses outlined in the Privacy Policy, you may be found to be in violation of your users' rights. Make sure that you are correctly and clearly outlining how your app uses a user's data.
The policies have been marked up with placeholders using {{Placeholder}} syntax, as well as comments using <!-- comment --> syntax. You should take care to ensure your final version of these policies have properly filled in or replaced & removed these before publishing them.
While you may use these policies however you like, we would advise that you consult with a legal professional regarding your own policies to fully understand the implications and protections therein, especially if you are receiving money from your users.
Open an issue if you have a question or comment regarding any section of these policies. Alternatively, DM @gasparr on Discord.
Automattic's Wordpress Policies may have some additional provisions and language that apply to your project better than our policies. Be aware these require attribution under CC BY-SA 4.0, unlike our policies.
Tupperbox Policy Templates by Tupperbox is marked with CC0 1.0
